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Twilight Saga: Eclipse DVD & Blu-Ray Sales Report

Twilight Eclipse DVD and Blu-Ray sales numbers have just been released, and while they’re unequivocally strong, the figures don’t align with that of the previous installments in the Twilight Saga.movie series

Eclipse’s Home Video Market debut commenced at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, December 4th, 2010, trading in the usual Tuesday release that has become customary for DVD and Blu-Ray releases.

Like the past Twilight movies, this effectively allowed fans of the series, many of which are either in school or work, to organize release parties and/or stay up late to purchase their copy of Eclipse right away.

According to Summit Entertainment, Twilight Eclipse sold slight more than 3 million Blu-Ray and DVD copies together during its first two days of release, December 4, 2010 and December 5, 2010. That is substantially less than both the number of units Twilight sold during its first two days of release in 2009, as well as what Twilight New Moon sold just earlier this year.

For comparisons sake, 3.8 million copies of Twilight were snatched up during its first two days of release 2009, and Twilight New Moon sold just slightly more than 4 million copies through its first two days on the market, following its release on March 23rd, 2010.

While this might come as a surprise to many, it’s very important to note that Twilight (2008) and Twilight New Moon made their DVD and Blu-Ray debut during the month of March, versus December release for Twilight Eclipse.

The change in the season presents drastic changes in the market, and the December frame is incredibly more crowded than March, which is immediately evident by the release of The Last Airbender, and Knight and Day, but even more importantly the Home Media Market premiere of Inception and Shrek 4 just yesterday.

The Home Media Magazine has a great quote from Steve Nickerson, who is the president of Summit Home Entertainment. You can read the quote below.

“With the first two titles, we had massive March opening events involving thousands of retail stores,” Nickerson said. “We were going for a big bang, right out of the gate. This time we are releasing the film during the holiday season, a much more crowded time and one with vastly different consumer shopping patterns. So our whole plan is to look at what we’re doing over a four-week period of time, and not a single night.”

Further stating: “We expect that come the beginning of the year, the performance of Eclipse will mirror that of the first two titles,” Nickerson said.

Either way, even if Twilight Eclipse doesn’t match the unit sales of its predecessors, it should in no way undermine the movie’s financial success. The movie had a rather modest production cost for a feature of its status of only $70 million, and has already taken in a massive $692 million worldwide at the box office.

Exact figures have yet to be officially released, but I estimate that the 3 million copies Twilight Eclipse sold generated Blu-Ray and DVD sales in the vicinity of $65 million to $75 million. Needless to say, the Twilight Franchise is hugely successful, and one that has seen profits bolstered by the low production budgets it has maintained.

However, it’s likely that Twilight Breaking Dawn will have a heightened production budget, that could very well exceed $90-$100 million.